Junk Bond Funds Rebound With $680 Mln Weekly Inflow – Lipper

By Michael Aneiro

A week after high-yield mutual funds and exchange-traded funds obliterated all previous records by posting a $7.1 billion weekly net outflow, cooler investor heads prevailed, with investors putting $680 million back into such funds in the latest week , per Lipper data.

Taking the temperature of the high yield market today, the average junk bond yields 5.545% and trades at 103.9 cents on the dollar, yielding 4.03 percentage points more than comparable Treasury yields, per a benchmark Bank of America Merrill Lynch high yield index. The market has rebounded after its sharp summer slide, gaining 0.9% in the past week.

The iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond Fund (HYG) gained 18 cents Thursday to close at $93.86, while the SPDR Barclays Capital High Yield Bond ETF (JNK) gained 11 cents to close at $41.15.

Amey Stone is Barron’s Income Investing blogger and Current Yield columnist. She was formerly a managing editor at CBS MoneyWatch, MSN Money and AOL DailyFinance. Her responsibilities included overseeing market coverage and personal finance topics. Prior to those roles, she was a senior writer at BusinessWeek where she authored the Street Wise column online and contributed to the magazine’s Inside Wall Street column. Topics covered included economics, corporate finance, Fed policy, municipal bonds, mutual funds and dividend investing. She co-authored King of Capital, a biography of Citigroup Chairman Sandy Weill. She is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.